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Corporate
Philanthropy in the New Urban Economy:
The
Role of Business-Nonprofit Realignment
in Regime Politics
by
Leonard
Nevarez
Department of
Sociology
Vassar
College
Accepted for publication in
Urban Affairs Review
November
2000
PHILANTHROPY
TO ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
The aforementioned patterns seem
to suggest that local dependence leads to community
philanthropy. Specifically, a local market and ties to local
business leaders appear to make corporate philanthropy to
community nonprofits more likely; since most of the software
and entertainment firms I studied have neither of these,
they would seem to have no compelling reason to give to
local groups. However, this pattern is not so simple, as the
next two fields of philanthropy suggest. Environmental
organizations are represented in Santa Monica, Santa
Barbara, and San Luis Obispo by, respectively, (1) Heal the
Bay, a coastal advocacy group; (2) the Community
Environmental Council, a local sustainability/recycling
foundation; and (3) the Environmental Center of San Luis
Obispo County (ECOSLO), an environmental advocacy
organization. The first two groups' leaders admit theirs are
not the most "radical" of local environmental organizations,
which they have found makes corporate philanthropy more
acceptable to business leaders. Nevertheless, they have
roots in the local environmental coalitions that have long
antagonized the traditional urban business
community.
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Table 2:
Contributions per firm (total contributions) to
largest community environmental
organizations
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locality
|
software
|
entertainment
|
tourism
|
banks
|
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Santa
Monica
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$27.77
($3,000)
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$936.56
($251,000)
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$26.04
($11,250)
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$272.73
($9,000)
|
|
Santa
Barbara
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$14.11
($1,990)
|
$0.00
($0)
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$0.00
($0)
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$73.53
($3,750)
|
|
San Luis
Obispo
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$0.00
($0)
|
$0.00
($0)
|
$0.00
($0)
|
$0.00
($0)
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Note: Individual gift
amounts were calculated using mean values of
reported gift ranges. Heal The Bay gifts include
cash value for in-kind donations.
Source: Contribution amounts come from Heal the Bay
11 (Spring 1998): 12-13; Community Environmental
Council 1996 annual report; author's interview with
ECOSLO executive director, May 27, 1989. Total
local firms derived from InfoUSA Inc.
(1998).
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In Table
2, entertainment's environmental philanthropy stands out
boldly, at least in Santa Monica (where the industry is
largest). In a year that Heal the Bay took in approximately
$1.1 million in income, almost one quarter came from
entertainment donors.5
Seven high-level entertainment figures (including a
television network president, a television celebrity, and
two film producers) sat on its 22-person board of directors;
the fact that other board members mostly came from
environmental and government backgrounds only underscores
this nonprofit's strong entertainment connection.
Entertainment philanthropy sustains, to varying degrees, two
other Santa Monica environmental organizations (one founded
by two actors) not represented in Table 2. At all three
Santa Monica organizations, celebrities and executives sit
on the boards of directors; studios and large entertainment
companies buy tables fund-raising benefits and awards
ceremonies; and advertising agencies and production houses
produce environmental TV spots at low or no cost to the
beneficiaries. Even in Santa Barbara, not an entertainment
stronghold relative to Santa Monica, actor Michael Douglas
paid the balance in a fund-raising campaign for the public
purchase of a popular open space tract (subsequently dubbed
the "Douglas Family Preserve") during my research
period.
Although the patterns for the
other three sectors are not consistent (since none of the
four sectors gave to San Luis Obispo's environmental
nonprofit), it appears that, entertainment excepted, none of
new urban economy sectors gives more than
banks&endash;perhaps an ironic finding, since
environmentalists are usually foes of the development agenda
that banks endorse. From software, only one firm gave to
Santa Monica's environmental organization, and three gave to
Santa Barbara's. For the years reported in Table 2, no
software executives sat on the boards of the three
environmental organizations. Although six tourism
corporations and executives gave to Santa Monica's Heal The
Bay, none gave money to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo's
environmental groups (although this does not reflect in-kind
gifts).
Protecting Business
Relationships
Many informants claimed that
entertainment's apparent environmentalism stems from the
personal convictions of many executives and talent. Their
explanation appears to pertain less to business structure
and more to Hollywood's famous "liberalism," a reputation
that many of my entertainment informants readily confirmed.
However, another factor points to entertainment's business
structure; in an industry overwhelmingly concentrated in
Southern California, environmental philanthropy provides a
useful vehicle for the "business" of relationship
maintenance. Entertainment embodies a talent-based
production process like software, but with a more socially
exclusive milieu of creativity. The centrality of ideas and
individuals in entertainment creates structures of
organization and production where the status of individuals
and firms is measured by personal access to resource
gatekeepers (see also Christopherson 1996). At the highest
levels level, independent producers, corporate executives,
and talent agencies (acting on behalf of directors, writers,
and actors) convert their access to in-demand talent into
star-studded "packages" (see Bielby and Bielby 1999). As the
record of legal battles over pilfered screenplay ideas and
broken verbal contracts suggests, accessing information and
individuals is fraught with high stakes and is thus highly
regulated.
In this context, entertainment
companies often support environmental groups and other
"industry standard" nonprofits because (executive informants
believe) this practice protects business relationships with
the high-level talent who espouse those causes. For example,
a popular celebrity was the executive director of a liberal
advocacy group; for its annual fund-raiser he solicited
talent agencies, film studios, and other "deep pockets"
firms with whom he worked to buy tables (in some cases as
much as $25,000 apiece). The administrator of Steven
Spielberg's and Barbara Streisand's charitable foundations
explained the rationale to the Los Angeles
Times:
You find a
celebrity who agrees to be honored and attract a crowd
of professional peers. Twenty-five percent of the
audience will be there because they believe in the
organization, and the rest are there because they feel
it's part of doing business.... It's a quid pro quo.
Everybody knows the honoree is a shill to bring in
their friends. It's just a matter of, do they care
enough about the cause to let themselves be used?
(quoted in Mitchell 1999, E1)
Thus, it does not matter that
the entertainment firm may have no direct interest in, or in
some cases sympathy for, its financial beneficiaries'
political concerns. Simply by doing business in a
relationship-driven industry, entertainment firms often lend
corporate resources to promoting environmental and liberal
nonprofits that talent personally supports. That the
environmental organizations are regionally focused in this
case is secondary to the fact that their fund-raisers take
place in Los Angeles, where the industry lives and works.
For entertainment, maintaining relationships is very much a
local matter.
NOTES
5. Firms represent less than a
third of Heal The Bay's 64 entertainment donors. The rest
are individuals or couples whose ranks include producers,
actors, directors, composers, and other high-level talent.
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